262 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [Bull. 176 



of the Mohave, little systematic "looking after." This love is given 

 quite indiscriminately by parents, kinsmen, and fellow-Mohave, so 

 that any child is a welcome visitor wherever its fancy takes it. 

 Similarly, partly because of the type of socialization prevalent in 

 Mohave society, and partly also because of the extreme mobility 

 and variable composition of JSIohave households, the child's affections, 

 as well as its hostilities, are spread quite early over much of the 

 tribe. Thus, whatever capacity for love the child possesses is not 

 monopolized by a few persons — such as members of his immediate 

 family — ^but is evenly distributed over a large area of the social body 

 (Devereux, 1939 a, 1942 d, 1950 f ) . 



Under these conditions it is almost certain that, at any given 

 moment, the cliild will receive love at least from some people, al- 

 though these givers of affection may not always be the same. This 

 means that, time and again, great demands are made upon the child's 

 ability to shift its emotional attachments from one person to another. 

 Thus, even though the child seldom, if ever, lacks food and/or love, 

 there is often no real constancy and continuity in the composition 

 of its "emotional environment." In brief, even though a stepmother 

 or stepfather, a grandparent, a kinsman or even some benevolent but 

 unrelated adult Mohave, may nurture the orphaned or neglected cliild 

 as generously as its own parents would, this constant shifting about, 

 together with the Mohave insistence on the importance of gens affili- 

 ations, may, in some instances, cause the cliild to feel — quite errone- 

 ously — that it lacks both love and care. 



The preceding statements apply primarily to the f ullblood Mohave 

 child, mostly regardless of whether it was born in or out of wedlock. 



The fate of half breeds (Case 76), or of children resulting from 

 the marriages or casual matings of a Mohave woman with members 

 of other tribes is, on the other hand, very different. The same is 

 true of children who, though conceived as fullblood Mohave Indians, 

 are considered aliens because of the Mohave belief that the racial, 

 tribal and even gens affiliation of the fullblood fetus can be changed 

 if the pregnant woman has intercourse with a person other than the 

 original impregnator (Devereux, 1949 c). Hence, unless the intrud- 

 ing male is a Mohave, who is willing to claim his wife's child as 

 his own, or else is a lesbian who proudly proclaims her "paternity" 

 (Devereux, 1937 b), the "halfbreed" infant was sometimes killed 

 (Devereux, 1948 d). Such infanticides were motivated not so much 

 by crude racial prejudice as by the Mohave Indian's genuine fear that 

 prolonged association with a "halfbrfed" would cause him to contract 

 the allegedly often fatal "foreign disease" (pt. 4, pp. 128-150). Hence 

 if such children were permitted to survive, their fate was a rather 

 unenviable one ; they were rejected by their maternal kin, and shimned 



